Bendy and the Ink Machine - 9/10

As is our occasional tradition, me and my roommates bought both the Bendy games during the Steam winter sale and scheduled a play session for today. For context, when Secret of the Mimic came out last year, we bought it on launch and played through the game in one sitting, passing the controller to the next person every time we died. We did the same with Bendy and the Ink Machine (2018) today, and as always, it was a blast.

You play as Henry, a man visiting the rundown Joey Drew Studios, an animation company he co-founded. The gameplay was a slog - you're forced to do a bunch of fetch quests and rudimentary puzzles, with exploration being heavily discouraged by the fact that you can only grab quest items/objectives AFTER you figure out what you need by finding the next blocker in your way. This happened with literally every objective, and it was never very difficult to figure out what to do next. Also, you are explicitly told the solution with a "Hint:" in the objective pop up that appears, except for ONE boss fight (which I won't discuss).

Other than that, I can't say anything negative about the game - the environments were stellar and varied enough that we were marvelling at every new type we saw (which was around 15!). The story left just enough questions to stay mysterious without being completely impenatrable (like some parts of SotM). The reveal at the end fell a little flat to me personally, but it and the final two chapters were great enough that I forgave the slog we went through earlier and raised my mental rating of the game from a 6 to a 9.

It did make me think about horror game level design w.r.t. building tension and denying the player a payoff to try and keep them on their toes though - Bendy, many times, puts you in a situation where you expect a jumpscare to come and it doesn't. Unfortunately, by the time the jumpscares actually start happening in these situations, you are numb to them and don't really get the full effect of them. Regardless though, there is plenty for the adrenaline junkie to like here.

In conclusion, I loved this game and we'll definitely be playing Bendy and the Dark Revival (2023) when we find the time probably next week.

Adios and see ya tomorrow!